The William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize is an important annual survey of contemporary photographic practice in Australia. Every year Monash Gallery of Art (MGA) invites artists to submit photo-based media, including analogue and digital photography, created over the last year for consideration.
Artist Rosemary Laing and Director of Agency and Senior Curator, Museums and Collections at University of Melbourne, Hannah Presley, joined MGA Director Anouska Phizacklea to select the winner and three Colour Factory Honourable Mentions from a shortlist of fifty-four works that form the 2022 edition of the Bowness Photography Prize.
Amos Gebhardt, Wallaby, 2022, chromogenic print (light box), 76 x 95cm. 2022 Winner Bowness Photography Prize $30,000 acquisitive award. Courtesy the artist, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne and Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne
Melbourne artist Amos Gebhardt has been awarded $30,000 for their winning work Wallaby, 2022, to be acquired into MGA’s nationally significant collection of Australian photographs.
Gebhardt’s photographic practice is characterised through a bold vision, conceptual rigour and an innovative approach to the medium. Recent acclaimed series include There are no others, 2016, which features gender-diverse people floating in celestial space; Evanescence, 2018, which depicts human collectives suspended in contested landscapes; Small acts of resistance, 2021, which celebrates queer familial entanglement; and most recently Wallaby, where Gebhardt has integrated x-ray and satellite imaging to explore themes of trauma and sentience. Gebhardt’s sustained and continued practice of producing work that is visually rich is epitomised by a courageous commitment to agitate dominant narratives around marginality, representation, queerness and more than human ecologies.
“Amos Gebhardt’s Wallaby sits at the boundaries of photography and taps into its inner core – refractions of light. It is an incredibly complex and poetic work. In one image the artist focuses on the untimely death of an individual creature and yet locates its significance within the cosmos. It asks us to consider life and death and the nature of sentient beings.”
– Anouska Phizacklea, MGA Director.
Petrina Hicks, Hercules, 2021, pigment ink-jet print, 100 x 123cm. Colour Factory Honourable Mention. Courtesy the artist, Michael Reid, Sydney and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne
Colour Factory Honourable Mentions were awarded to Petrina Hicks for her arresting and provocative exploration of motherhood in Hercules, 2021; Danie Mellor for the haunting and moving large-scale work that incorporates archival and recent infra-red imagery to address the rich cultural traditions connected with Country and the history of photographic images that helped to shape the development of Australian colonial and settler identity in The far country, 2022; and Sonia Payes for her work Exoplanet 1, 2022, which is an otherworldly evocation of volcanic forces that explode and rip into the Earth’s core.
Danie Mellor, The far country, 2022, chromogenic prints, 180 x 120cm (each). Colour Factory Honourable Mention. Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
Sonia Payes, Exoplanet 1, 2022, chromogenic print, 60 x 100cm. Colour Factory Honourable Mention. Courtesy the artist and Scott Livesey Gallery, Melbourne
Voting for the Smith & Singer People’s Choice Award is open until the last day of the exhibition: 13 November 2022.
Also, one artist from this year’s finalist exhibition will be selected for the $10,000 Wai Tang Commissioning Award, which will coincide with the 2023 Bowness Photography Prize exhibition season.
